It’s something that’s likely to please some while angering others, but Ridley Scott has been hinting at the direction his Alien prequel(s) will take, and it sounds like it’s likely to divide audiences, while potentially being pretty intriguing.
As part of an interview with The Independent, he told them ‘The film will be really tough, really nasty. Its the dark side of the moon. We are talking about gods and engineers. Engineers of space. And were the aliens designed as a form of biological warfare? Or biology that would go in and clean up a planet?’
That certainly won’t please those who hoped the aliens were natural, or those who don’t want to know their backstory at all, but it does make some sense. After all, they had to get into space somehow, and it’s difficult to imagine there are xenomorphs with advanced rocketry degrees. It puts into context what Ridley has said previously to MTV, ‘Its set in 2085, about 30 years before Sigourney [Weaver’s character Ellen Ripley]. Its fundamentally about going out to find out Who the hell was that Space Jockey? The guy who was sitting in the chair in the alien vehicle – there was a giant fellow sitting in a seat on what looked to be either a piece of technology or an astronomers chair. [The film] is about the discussion of terraforming – taking planets and planetoids and balls of earth and trying to terraform, seed them with the possibilities of future life.’
It all does kind of make sense, as with the spaceship Ripley and co. find in the first film, there is a resemblance between the ship, the aliens and the space jockey, suggesting they all originate from the same place, and now it appears the aliens may have been created to help with terraforming. However for all the answers, we’ll have to wait for Ridley’s film(s) to materialise.